THE FRESHDESK ADVANTAGE

< 3 days

First Contact Resolution

70%

Average First Response Time

3 minutes

About CEQUENS

Based out of Cairo, Egypt, CEQUENS is a leading Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) provider in the Middle East and Africa region. CEQUENS currently serves over 500+ enterprises, on a regional and global scale, and provide omnichannel APIs and telecommunication solutions to enable businesses to communicate with their customer base worldwide. Some of the enterprises that CEQUENS caters to include SAP, HSBC, Google, SWVL, Careem, Telegram, among many others.

The challenges posed by a legacy system

According to Mostafa AbdElKader, Manager of Customer Service and Business Operations at CEQUENS, the company was using a popular legacy solution to manage their customer support prior to their association with Freshworks. The tool posed quite a few challenges and was not the most intuitive solution. One of the primary challenges that Mostafa highlights is how the cluttered and outdated UI, along with the limited functionality, made it difficult for his 29-member strong support team to stay in control of the tasks at hand.

For example, cross-team collaboration had become a major hurdle. A customer query that needed engineering help would require constant follow-ups and multiple phone calls to be made by the support agents. This, in turn, impacted their productivity and their ability to stick to tight deadlines and SLAs.

Also, as the company was scaling its business and operations, they wanted to adopt other communication channels apart from email and phone. They were constantly on the lookout for a helpdesk solution that will bring customer messages from these diverse channels into an easily accessible, unified inbox.

The lack of a robust and intuitive customer-facing portal was another major bottleneck for CEQUENS. They wanted customers to be able to access a niche portal from where they could find knowledge base articles, FAQs, and more information, without having to dig around too much.

Changing fortunes with Freshdesk

When CEQUENS got on board with Freshdesk, they could immediately see a significant positive impact on their day to day support operations. An excited Mostafa tells us that there were 3 big wins with Freshdesk -

1. Instant setup and migration

“We tried solutions from close to 16 vendors before zeroing in on Freshdesk. What really won us over was the world-class customer service that helped us make the transition almost instantly. We shut shop with the other support solution on Thursday, and started using Freshdesk on Sunday. That’s all it took, 3 days were sufficient for the smooth migration of all our ticket data and customer information”, Mostafa explained.

Mostafa was also particularly happy with the work of our onboarding team who were extremely resourceful, patient and offered personalized help.

2. A rapid improvement in productivity metrics like FCR and SLA%

When asked about how his team welcomed Freshdesk, here’s what Mostafa had to say - “Our support agents were over the moon when they laid their hands on Freshdesk. They loved the overall look and feel, as well as how fast and responsive it was. They were glad that they finally had a system in place which could govern their performance and ensure they weren’t missing out on SLA deadlines. The automations and collaboration features made our internal helpdesk operations much more digital and reduced manual work to a large extent. We no longer had to frantically make phone calls, or run to a different floor to get help from the engineering team.”

Mostafa also pointed out that there was a sizeable improvement in important customer service metrics like their first contact resolution (FCR) and SLA percentage. The FCR, for instance, saw a major jump from 29% closed incidents to 70% closed incidents on first contact. Average first response time saw a major boost as well. According to Mostafa, “We went from an expected response time of about an hour to just 3 minutes.” Such numbers were achieved because of the upturn in productivity brought about by Freshdesk.

3. A self-service experience loved by customers

Mentioning the impact Freshdesk’s knowledge base made on their daily support routine, Mostafa said, “Our customers felt uplifted upon seeing their new self-service portal. They were impressed with the fact that we now have a podium with knowledge articles on it, where they can view their own tickets, understand who's working on them, the status and priority of the requests, and much more. It definitely made their lives a lot easier.”

Other impactful features

Freshdesk also allowed CEQUENS to gauge customer feedback in a much more streamlined fashion. Mostafa was particularly impressed with how easy Freshdesk made it for customers to rate agent responses through a click of a button. He said, “You know some customers are a little shy over the phone when you ask them for feedback. They aren’t too willing to be expressive. Freshdesk’s customer satisfaction surveys solved this problem for us. We can now measure our CSAT percentage with much more confidence.”

“Our support agents were over the moon when they laid their hands on Freshdesk. They were glad that they finally had a system in place which could govern their performance and ensure they weren’t missing out on SLA deadlines. The automations and collaboration features made our internal helpdesk operations much more digital and reduced manual work to a large extent. We no longer had to frantically make phone calls, or run downstairs to get help from the engineering team.”

Mostafa AbdElKader

Manager of Customer Service and Business Operations

CEQUENS

Embracing the new normal with Freshworks

When quizzed about how CEQUENS is dealing with the current Coronavirus crisis and the impact on business, and whether they could adopt remote support quickly with Freshdesk, a very proud Mostafa said, “My team was one of the first to start working from home full time when the pandemic outbreak occurred. This is a success story that we’re proud of and Freshdesk helped make this process as seamless as possible. Because Freshdesk is always up and running, my support agents had zero problems working from home and could ensure they were always in control of customer problems.”

As CEQUENS continues to scale and grow in the future, Mostafa is also evaluating other Freshworks products. They currently use Freshdesk, Freshchat, and our free tools like Freshconnect, Freshstatus, and Freshping. He is also keeping a close eye on some of our other offerings, and hopes to experiment with some advanced Freshdesk features like the AI-powered bot engine as well.

Interested in Freshdesk?

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